Word: londoners
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Most top private dealers dislike the system of guarantees and loans. "It creates an immediate conflict of interest," says Julian Agnew, managing director of the London firm of Agnew's. "If the auction house has a financial involvement with both seller and buyer, its status as an agent is compromised. Lending to the buyer is like margin trading on the stock market. It creates inflation. It causes instability...
Julian Agnew, the London dealer, believes that "outside regulators could create as many problems as they solve -- they may not know the market well enough. Ideally, self-regulation is better. But if a dominant firm stretches the unwritten norms of the past, ((self-regulation)) may not be enough...
...today is the work of the Russian avant-garde -- Rodchenko, Popova, Larionov, Lissitsky, Malevich -- which, as a result of perestroika, is coming on the market in some quantity after 60 years of Stalinist-Brezhnevian repression. Prices are zooming, and authentication is thin. Sotheby's held a Russian sale in London in April 1989. It contained, according to some scholars, two outright fakes ascribed to Liubov Popova and one dubious picture, badly restored and signed on the front -- something Popova never did with her oil paintings. Doubts about the authenticity of these works were voiced to the auction house...
...keys to the transformation of the contemporary market is going to be the discreet dispersal of the huge collection formed, mostly after 1980, by the advertising mogul Charles Saatchi, whose London firm is now in difficulties. Saatchi bought in bulk, sometimes whole exhibitions at a time. He acquired, for instance, more than 20 Anselm Kiefers, whose prices are now past the $1 million mark, and at least 15 Eric Fischls, which are on or around it. Artists let him have the cream of their work because it was understood -- though never explicitly said -- that Saatchi would never sell; his collection...
...jumped from $90,000 to $140,000 in the past six months, but Scullys are trading on the secondary market as high as $350,000, and Saatchi recently unloaded a block of nine of them on the Swedish dealer Bo Alveryd, who last month spent $70 million at three London galleries (Marlborough, Waddington and Bernard Jacobson) before moving on to the New York fall auctions. There he underbid the $20.68 million De Kooning and bought, among other things, a Johns for $12.1 million. "I thought Saatchi had good intentions," Scully says. "Now it turns out that he's only...